There Can Be Only One
by Midwich Cuckoo
Summary: TCP. One out of four identical quadruplets is a mutant.


**Beta: Moviemom44**

**Disclaimer: I don't own any rights to it for I have nothing to do with Marvel.**

**I'm fascinated with multiple births and unexplained stories (especially with mysterious disappearances) too.**

**THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE**

So finally, this story can be told. Finally – I'm telling this with a sigh of relief. Or… I would if only I was capable of sighing or doing anything else for that matter. You know, I always truly hated unexplained stories. How the crew of the _Mary Celeste _ended up. What really happened to Dorothy Arnold and Judge Crater. And the Beaumont siblings. And who the famous Boy in the Box was. Since my earliest years I loved those stories but hated how they ended – with a mystery no one could explain and which would remain unexplained through generations. Yet, the story of my life is going to be like that – told but not heard. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

It was my older brother who loved everything that was unexplained and over the years infected me with this love. My older brother Micah who is long dead now. The same as my other brother, Casey who was in turn younger than myself – by barely a couple of minutes. And Micah was just a couple of minutes older than me. There was also the fourth brother, Jared. He came just a few minutes after Casey.

Yes, you have heard well. We, the Smith brothers, were born as quadruplets. Identical ones, to boot. Another version of the Keys quadruplets born at the beginning of the 20th century. Except that we were an all-male set - and a mutant one, in addition. Well, really it was just one brother who had powers although the fact of him having them caused the rest of us get some sort of them too – on a smaller scale. But I'll tell you about that in a moment.

We looked identical but if you came to know us, you knew our personalities were different. Micah was the oldest and at the same time, the smartest and most mature among us. When we were in our early teens, some family's friend said that actually the only difference between the oldest Smith brother and an adult man was purely biological. I am inclined to fully agree with that. Casey was in turn the most athletic out of us – very strong and fit. I, Jayden, was an artistic type; the mildest and calmest one. As for Jared… well, he had this ability.

We led a normal life – as normal as the life of identical quadruplets to whom everybody pays attention can be – throughout our whole childhood and early teenage years. We played football, talked with friends and did everything that little and later teenage boys do. Back then, the only difference between us and other boys was that we were identical.

But later, the summer we turned 15, everything changed. Jared started to exhibit mental powers. We didn't expect it because how could we? At the beginning we thought we all had this power but later it turned out that it was only Jared, the youngest of us.

Actually, I think in some ways it was fair. That if any of us was to get powers, it should be him. Micah was some sort of family genius, I was a talented painter and writer, Casey was a star athlete and Jared… well, was normal. Ordinary. Just a boy and that's all. He was very controlling though and it was the most distinctive feature of his. That's really the nicest way I can put it. Our youngest brother was a boy who liked having everything under control. Really, really liked. And when he didn't, it always made him really angry. My brother could spend whole hours squatting on the floor, holding his head in his hands, with an angry face. I could only guess how much he must hate his hopelessness. And when his power activated, I could feel it on my own mind, getting direct access to his thoughts. This is how his powers worked. He could contact us whenever he wanted, letting us know his thoughts. We could contact him too but it wasn't about our being able to contact via thought – he just received our thoughts and answered them. He always could receive them. When he connected his mind with ours, we could communicate telepathically with each other – only when he let us do it. I said we got some sort of powers too. Otherwise it wouldn't be possible; we weren't mutants ourselves, none of us – neither Micah nor Casey nor me. It was Jared who was a mutant. Another aspect of his power developed then was the ability to control. I believe the mutant ability often has a catalyst which lets it get some particular shape and with Jared this was the case. An avid traveler becomes a teleporter, a shy person gains the ability to turn invisible, a person having three brothers with whom he shared one womb manifests the ability to communicate them. Communicate – and control. Yes, it was the most important thing about this. With the activation of this gift, the days of Jared's gloomy musing over how much he hated not being in the position of power, were over.

This particular telepathy worked just on us and no one else. Back then, at least. As hard as Jared tried, in those days he couldn't force anyone else from beyond our small circle to follow his will, nor could he contact them. His telepathic gift was limited just to us four. It must have been about our being quadruplets. We couldn't tell anyone even if we wanted. We knew what people thought about those like our brother.

But there was also one more aspect of this whole story – even if we had anyone to tell, we were too afraid to do it, that was the truth. When I say that my brother liked control, this is what I mean. In short, a control freak was the best term describing him. And he liked practicing his power on us. Take Micah, for example. One hot summer morning our oldest brother woke up near a hammock suspended between the trees in the garden belonging to our neighbor. With no clothes on. And the worst thing about this that was that in the hammock there was sleeping the neighbor's daughter. She had decided to spend that night in a hammock. You can imagine her screams when she woke up – it was the moment when Micah woke up as well. And her dad's anger. Poor Micah really got into trouble then. And later Casey. Jared forced him to insult his girlfriend. And our grandma who came to visit us. And later our teacher – only this time it was me who admitted to this. Jared forced me to admit it was me, that I was actually Casey and Casey was me – I don't need to add that Casey was also mentally controlled by Jared and as the result he said his name was Jayden.

Even if we weren't afraid of our youngest brother and what he could do to us, we wouldn't be able to tell anyone about who was really standing beyond all those misdeeds. Jared would soon read the thought about sharing our version of the truth with anyone and well… do something really unpleasant to the one who would take the risk to try. We even didn't dare to think what it could be. So the only thing we could do was hope that our brother would somehow grow out of this (though, realistically, this thought was just a defense mechanism on our part) or that in a couple of years we would leave home to go to college (we hoped in this way we would be out of his reach).

But the things just got worse and worse and neither our parents nor anyone else for that matter suspected a thing. They didn't suspect that when we broke things, insulted people, stole things in stores (so clumsily that the shop assistants instantly saw us and called the police), kicked our dog and did many other things no parent would ever be proud of their kids doing them, none of those were our choice. Not that we were doing them so often. It was really just once every couple of weeks - in case some of you thought that since Jared manifested powers, every single day of ours was a symphony of evil.

We thought that when we left home to study things would turn out to be better. Only they didn't. In fact, it was the beginning of the end. Not the end of Jared's evil tricks performed on us. The end of the life of Micah. One autumn day our brother just didn't go home from school. He was the only one who was in school that day; the rest of us were lying in bed with a cold. Or maybe he was the only one who was going to go to school for he never arrived there. His dead body was found in the river floating near our house the next day. The police said he must have slipped and fell in but we knew better. Jared told us it was he who did it. We were in shock. How could you ever suspect your brother, though manipulative and malicious could be a murderer to boot? But he was and the reason was very simple – his powers developed. Jared was now capable of contacting others in the same way he did to us – something none of us thought was possible. He couldn't read their minds as such but he was perfectly capable of sliding mentally into their bodies to control them. And he didn't need us anymore. Neither Micah, nor Casey nor me – he was going to be the only child of our parents. He felt fed up with his being referred to as just part of the team of quadruplets, one of four clones. He wanted individuality.

It was why he gave Micah the telepathic order to jump into the river. And why after several months he did the same to Casey, with one difference. This time he made him cut his veins. I was sure it wasn't going to happen, that Micah was his first but also last victim at the same time. Jared swore to us he wasn't going to hurt us, that Micah was going to tell our parents and he had to prevent this. But that was at the beginning. Later, Jared erased the memory of our talks with him on this. For half a year we forgot Jared had anything to do with Micah' death. But after mom found Casey's dead body in his bed one morning, Jared removed the mental blockades from my memory, behind which hid the memory of Jared telling me and my now deceased brother that he was responsible for our other sibling's death. Now this memory was in my mind again, fresh as if it was yesterday, which I realized with fear. And now Jared was telling me that he only joked telling us that Micah was his last victim because he wanted to kill all of us. And I was the only one left. He wanted once and for all to be the only child in the family, not just one of four, not just one in the army of four clones. And I knew he was one of those people who always achieve their aim.

But I forgot about this conversation too due to Jared's efforts. He was really good at erasing memories from people's minds, I must agree about this even now, being in my miserable condition. I remember all of this because he gave me my memories back last week. And he wouldn't have done that had it not been his final step on the path leading him to his Highlander–like aim – "There can be only one".

Last week I woke up and couldn't move. I couldn't scream, move my eyelids – nothing at all. I could only breathe and feel on my skin the cold and rotten scent of our cellar. I didn't know what was happening. In the evening I went to bed, enjoying the solitude we shared with Jared – our parents were out of town and were to come back in two weeks. They really needed vacation after the death of their two sons. Jared and me were to be alone. Yet now instead of laying in my comfortable, cozy bed between the quilt and linen of which I had slipped the day before, I was lying on the rough cement floor of our cellar. I knew it for sure – even if I didn't recognize the smell of our cellar, Jared would have told me about this. His voice resounded in my head. At this one moment, I recalled the circumstances of the deaths of my brothers and our talks about them Jared and I had afterwards. And I knew now what he was going to do to me. I knew even without the words of his which were seeping into my head, filling me with fear, the worse of which was my realization that I wasn't going to get out. That I could consider myself already dead even if I was still breathing and my heart, rapidly beating now, was still pumping blood. My brother wanted my death to be long and lasting many days, unlike it was with our other two siblings. He wished their deaths had been really long and painful – like mine was going to be. He said when I died of starvation and thirst, he would pour acid over my body and tell our parents I run away for I couldn't live with the awareness of having killed my brothers any longer, slowly being eaten by pricks of conscience. Yes, he wrote on the computer "my" acknowledgement of guilt and printed it, putting it under my pillow, eventually to be found by him when, disturbed by my disappearance, he was checking out all the crooks and nooks of the bedroom we shared. This is how the story of the quadruplets - one of whom was an evil mutant - is going to end.

If this story was one from a novel, I would be found by some mutant telepath who would help me get out and get rid of my brother but real life isn't that good. I will die soon – I'm giving myself one day at best. Thirst is the worst but now, five days later even the suffering of it is slowly starting to fade – paradoxically. I know I'm dying and that the dream of my mutant brother will come true. I think I have just a couple of hours left. I'm telling this story, sending it mentally to any mutant telepath who could pass by – but I know no one like this is going to come and save me. I'm even not a mutant like my brother – who now is listening to me, laughing at me in his malicious mental laughter. My parents aren't ever going to find out the truth. I'm glad that at least I managed to tell this story even if there is no one to listen to it – except for my brother. It's a pity no one will discover the truth. But at least I managed to tell it – even if voicelessly. It's my only consolation.


End file.
